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Can I use Whereby for online tutoring?

You can — Whereby is one of the friendlier browser-based video-call tools around, and a lot of solo therapists, coaches, and one-on-one adult tutors run a happy practice on it — but Whereby is a meeting tool with tutoring bolted on, not a tutoring classroom, and the mismatch shows up fastest with young learners and with anything the student needs to do during the lesson rather than watch. Whereby gives you an instant browser call at a persistent room URL (no download, no login for the family), a nice UI, screen sharing, and chat — and, on the paid Pro plan, local recording, breakout groups, file sharing, background effects, and custom branding. Whereby's Meetings page also lists a virtual whiteboard among its collaboration features. What it does not give you is a lesson surface built for teaching — a canvas you can load a worksheet or a PDF onto, activities the student can act on, a scheduling and invoicing layer, or an engagement mechanic designed for children. Whereby's Free tier caps meetings at 30 minutes and 4 attendees; the Pro tier ($10.99/host/month per whereby.com/information/meetings/pricing) lifts both. Whereby is a good stopgap for one-to-one adult and teenage lessons that are mostly talking; it's the wrong primary tool for a paid, ongoing practice with young learners.

What Whereby actually is

Whereby describes itself as a browser-based video-conferencing product built in Europe, "GDPR and HIPAA compliant, and ISO 27001 certified" (whereby.com). It ships as two separate products, and it's worth being clear which one you're looking at:

  • Whereby Meetings — the standalone video-call product you sign up for as an individual. You get a persistent room URL (something like whereby.com/your-room-name) that stays yours; you share the link and anyone can join in their browser. This is what an indie tutor would use.
  • Whereby Embedded — an API and SDK for developers who want to bake Whereby's video call into someone else's product (a telehealth platform, an eLearning platform, a therapy scheduling app). This is not what you'd buy as a tutor; it's what a tutoring platform vendor might build with. Out of scope here.

Everything in the rest of this page is about Whereby Meetings. Its whole pitch, in Whereby's own words: "All calls run directly in your browser, making it easy to join and connect during a session. No additional logins or app downloads required. Works seamlessly for desktops and mobile" (whereby.com/information/meetings). That is honestly one of the nicer things about it — for a family that's spent the last five years installing new video apps every six months to talk to a doctor, a school, a therapist, and now a tutor, Whereby's "click the link, be in the room" experience is a small quality-of-life win.

The pieces you'd actually use in a lesson:

  • A persistent, memorable room URL. The parent bookmarks it once and clicks the same link every week. This is closer to how a real classroom works (walk into the same room every Tuesday) than the meeting-link-per-lesson dance Zoom / Meet still make you do.
  • Video and audio calls in the browser. The Free plan caps calls at 30 minutes and 4 attendees per meeting per Whereby's pricing page; Pro lifts both — 100 attendees per meeting and no time limit — for $10.99 per host per month (Whereby's own pricing page, USD, excluding VAT). Business is $13.99 per host per month with a 3-host minimum and is priced for teams rather than solo tutors.
  • Screen sharing. Available on all tiers per the pricing table. Same shape as Zoom or Meet: you share what's on your screen and the student watches.
  • Chat inside the call. Send messages, reactions, and files during a session (whereby.com/information/meetings).
  • A virtual whiteboard. Whereby's Meetings page lists "breakout groups, file sharing, and virtual whiteboards to support seamless collaboration" (whereby.com/information/meetings). It's a meeting whiteboard — a shared surface for sketching an idea mid-call — and it doesn't appear in the per-tier pricing comparison, so check which plan you land on before you count on it. What it isn't is a lesson canvas: there's nothing to upload a worksheet or a PDF into and teach from, and no library of activities sitting behind it.
  • File sharing. Listed as a Pro-tier feature in the pricing comparison — not available on Free.
  • Local recording (Pro and up). Whereby's pricing page lists "Local Recording" as a Pro feature and "Unlimited recording" in the Pro plan card. The file records to your machine; sharing, storing, and deleting it are your workflow.
  • Custom branding (Pro and up). Your logo and colours on the room; useful for looking like a real practice rather than a personal call. Also a custom subdomain on Business.
  • Breakout Groups and Hybrid meetings (Pro and up). Useful mostly if you run small-group sessions with mixed adults; a solo 1-on-1 tutor rarely needs either.
  • Locked rooms and a waiting-room experience. Control who joins your room; the Business tier adds custom waiting-room configuration.
  • Background effects and noise reduction. Standard camera / microphone quality-of-life features; both sit on Pro and up in the pricing comparison, not on Free.

That is a legitimately well-designed meeting tool — and it is a meeting tool, not a tutoring tool. A meeting whiteboard aside, the pricing page's per-tier feature comparison lists no lesson canvas you can load teaching material into, no activity library, no scheduling flow, no invoicing, no engagement layer for young learners. Every capability above is one you'd want in a therapy session, a coaching call, a consultant's client meeting, or a one-on-one adult lesson; none of them are ones a working tutor of young children would build a lesson around.

Why solo tutors keep considering Whereby

Three reasons come up honestly, and they're worth naming rather than dismissing:

  • The "no download" experience. The parent has already had to install Zoom for the pediatrician, Meet for the school Zoom-fatigue committee, Teams for the workplace, and a portfolio of "this specific specialist uses this specific app" installs. "Click this link and you're in the lesson" is a real relief to them, and if you've ever spent the first ten minutes of a first paid lesson helping a parent update Zoom, you know why it matters.
  • The persistent room URL. A single link a family bookmarks once matches the mental model of "we go to the same place at the same time every Tuesday." It removes the "which link was the one for tonight?" question a per-lesson-link tool creates.
  • The friendly, European, privacy-forward positioning. Whereby markets itself as European-owned and GDPR / ISO 27001 compliant; for a family that has actively opted out of American Big Tech video, that positioning is not marketing fluff — it is the reason they picked their doctor's telehealth vendor, and it will feel familiar. This matters more in some European markets than others; if your practice sits inside one where families ask about data protection, it's a genuine leg up over Zoom on the trust axis before you've even started the trial.

What none of these three do is fix the shape of the thing itself. A friendly video call plus a persistent URL is still a friendly video call; a paid tutoring lesson with a nine-year-old learning fractions is a different job.

Where a Whereby-as-classroom stack breaks for tutoring

  • The whiteboard is a meeting whiteboard, not a lesson surface. Whereby does list a virtual whiteboard, and for sketching a diagram mid-call it's fine. What it isn't is a place the lesson lives: there's nothing to upload the worksheet or the PDF into and teach from, no fraction bars or number lines to drag, no phonics tiles to sort, and no library of activities sitting behind it. Screen share fills that gap, and screen share is a thing the student watches. For younger learners and for any subject where doing beats watching, this is the biggest gap.
  • No activity library. Phonics matching, dragging fraction bars, sorting words into categories, snapping shapes together — the interactive activities working tutors of young kids build a lesson around are not something a video-call tool has a home for. You end up screen-sharing another tool over the call, which introduces the next problem down the list.
  • Screen share isn't interactive. If you share the browser tab where a student practice site lives, the student sees your cursor moving; they can't click, drag, or type into the page themselves. On a small tablet the readable-text problem compounds — you're squeezing a laptop-sized site into a tablet screen and the student has to fight your scrolling. See what is a cobrowser? for the specific mechanic that fixes this and screen share doesn't.
  • Free-tier caps hit a tutor's real day. Whereby's Free plan caps meetings at 30 minutes and 4 attendees. A one-hour paid lesson doesn't fit; a small-group session past 4 people doesn't fit. Real tutoring lands on the Pro plan ($10.99 per host per month, per whereby.com's pricing page) from lesson one, so the "free forever" framing doesn't apply to a paid practice — you're paying from day one, and you're paying for a meeting tool, not a teaching tool.
  • No scheduling flow parents can use. Whereby's Meetings page offers to "integrate your rooms with Google calendars" (whereby.com/information/meetings), but that's putting a room on a calendar, not a "parent books this Tuesday at 4 PM against my open availability" flow. Every reschedule is a manual back-and-forth in email or messages. You'll bolt on Calendly, YouCanBook.me, or a dedicated tutoring scheduler.
  • No first-party invoicing. Whereby doesn't bill parents. You'll add Stripe, PayPal, Wise, Venmo, a local bank transfer, or manual invoicing outside the app — and reconcile which student paid for which package inside a spreadsheet somewhere. If your students are in different currencies the friction is bigger than one bolt-on.
  • No engagement layer for young learners. Face-on-tile is still face-on-tile. There are no stars, no gems, no avatars, no shared space for the student to be in as a character rather than as a thumbnail on the parent's laptop. A background effect isn't an engagement mechanic; a rewards spreadsheet the parent tracks is workflow you run in parallel with Whereby, not part of it.
  • Recording is a file, not a workflow. Local Recording on Pro gives you an MP4 on your machine. There's no per-lesson home for it, no automatic labelling by student and date, no built-in retention policy or share-with-parent flow — that's yours to build with folders and a naming convention. See below.
  • Region-specific reachability is your problem to check. Whereby is European-hosted and doesn't publish the kind of prominent "we work behind these firewalls" statement that a China-first family would want to see. If any of your students are inside mainland China or a region whose access rules to European telecoms services change, you own the connectivity check. See teaching English to students in mainland China.
  • One room URL on Free, three on Pro. Free gives you 1 room URL, Pro gives you 3 (per whereby.com's pricing page). If you teach five different students at five different times and want a different room URL per family, you'd need Business ($13.99 per host per month, 3-host minimum). Most tutors work around this by using the same room URL and staggering lessons — which is fine, but it means the parent's mental model of "our room" is actually "the tutor's room, that we happen to share with four other families."

The typical "Whereby + bolt-ons" tutoring stack

Tutors who run a whole practice on Whereby usually end up assembling a stack that looks roughly like this — the specifics differ by market but the shape doesn't:

  • Whereby — video call, chat, screen share, local recording (Pro), file sharing (Pro), persistent room URL
  • Miro, Whiteboard.fi, a shared Google Slides file, or a paid whiteboard tool — a lesson canvas you can load material into, once Whereby's own whiteboard stops stretching
  • A shared Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox folder — where worksheets and lesson recordings live
  • Calendly, a Google Calendar link, or a dedicated tutoring scheduler — booking and rescheduling that doesn't cost you a message every time
  • Stripe, PayPal, Wise, or a local bank transfer — getting paid across currencies
  • OBS, QuickTime, or a browser extension — if the local recording Pro provides isn't enough
  • A sticker chart, a Google Sheet, or Class Dojo — rewards for younger learners
  • A spreadsheet — to track which student paid for which package, how many lessons are left, and who owes a make-up

None of that is broken. It's the same friction Zoom-shaped and Meet-shaped tutoring stacks live with, in a friendlier browser video shell. For tutors with a small steady book of adult 1-on-1 clients that's tolerable — plenty of coaching and therapy practices run this way for years, and the Whereby experience genuinely is nicer than the alternatives on that specific job. For tutors teaching young learners on shared screens, or for practices growing past ten or fifteen weekly students, the tab-switching tax compounds every lesson.

When Whereby is a reasonable fit for tutoring

  • You teach one-on-one adults or teenagers where the lesson is mostly talking — conversation practice, business English, IELTS speaking prep, university-level tutoring by discussion, coding review, professional coaching. A clean video call in a persistent room plus a shared PDF over chat is often enough, and Whereby's UX is easier on both sides than Zoom's.
  • You value the "no download for the family" experience over any specific feature. If a big fraction of your no-shows or bad first impressions come from "the parent couldn't figure out how to install X," moving to Whereby will genuinely fix that, and that alone can be worth the switch.
  • Your practice sits inside a European market where the GDPR / European-hosted positioning is a real trust signal for families. Whereby's compliance framing — GDPR, ISO 27001, and HIPAA per whereby.com — will resonate with the kind of family that already opted for European-hosted email and a European-hosted note tool.
  • You're running a first paid trial lesson with a family that finds new software difficult, and you want the setup to disappear so both of you can focus on whether the tutoring itself is a fit. Whereby's browser-first experience removes one variable from the first impression.
  • You need a fallback for when your main teaching tool has a bad day. Every tutor should have one; a Whereby room the parent can bookmark is a reasonable one to keep in your back pocket.

When it isn't

  • You teach young learners (roughly four to ten) and the retention story your parents write in reviews is about engagement — "she never wants to log off" — rather than curriculum. Video calls give a young learner one thing to do (talk when unmuted) and one thing to look at (a face on a screen). It falls short of what an engagement-designed classroom gives them.
  • You teach reading, phonics, math manipulatives, or any subject where the student needs to act on the material — dragging letters, sorting shapes, placing counters on a number line. Screen share plus voice narration is not a substitute for the student doing the thing themselves.
  • You teach students on tablets or Chromebooks. Screen share on a small tablet shrinks text below readable size and turns pinch-to-zoom into a wrestling match with the host's scrolling. A cobrowser fixes this; a Whereby screen share doesn't.
  • You teach students inside mainland China or in another region whose access to European services you can't confirm. Whereby doesn't publish prominent "works behind X" reachability guidance, so the connectivity risk falls on you.
  • You're growing past the number of students you can hold in your head. Ten students booking and rescheduling in your Whereby room is fine; twenty-five isn't, and the fix isn't a bigger inbox — it's a scheduler with a policy attached and an invoicing tool that reconciles itself.
  • You want a single login that handles video, the lesson canvas, activities the student can act on, scheduling, and invoicing — and you're past the "am I really doing this?" stage of building a tutoring business. Collapsing the stack is what a purpose-built virtual classroom is for.

What about recording on Whereby?

Whereby's Pro tier (and above) includes Local Recording, per its pricing page. That means the recording file lands on your device — you press record, the app captures the call, and you get an MP4 when the lesson ends. Sharing it with a parent, storing it somewhere they can find it later, and deleting it when you don't need it any more is manual: there's no per-lesson home for a recording, no automatic labelling by student and date, no built-in retention policy, no "share recording with the parent for the lesson she missed" flow inside the tool. Purpose-built tutoring classrooms tend to ship recording as a first-class feature that ties the file back to a specific lesson. See how do I record online tutoring lessons? for the broader workflow — including the consent step you should be walking parents through regardless of which tool you record in; the practical rule of thumb is to get explicit parental consent in writing, check what your local rules require (recording law varies by jurisdiction), and only keep recordings as long as you actually need them.

Purpose-built alternatives — what tutors typically switch to

The bigger reason a lot of long-time Whereby tutors eventually move the lesson surface elsewhere is that the "friendly meeting tool plus a stack of other apps" shape stops paying its rent past a certain practice size. The category that grew up around it — purpose-built virtual classrooms for online tutoring — is described in depth on what is a virtual classroom?, with a head-to-head shortlist of options on the best Zoom alternatives for online tutoring. Both are worth reading if you're actively picking a Whereby replacement rather than defaulting to "well, the browser experience is nice."

Where Koala Go (the classroom we build) fits, specifically:

  • Also browser-based, no download, no separate app account for the family. The parent bookmarks a link the same way they'd bookmark a Whereby room. So the "no install" experience that draws tutors to Whereby is not something you give up moving to a real teaching tool.
  • An interactive whiteboard with PDF, PowerPoint, and image upload. The file becomes the lesson surface — the student annotates the same page you're teaching from. This is the difference between a meeting whiteboard and a teaching one: it isn't a blank sketch surface next to the call, it's where your actual material goes.
  • A cobrowser (a live shared browser window). You and the student open the same real webpage together, both with your own cursor, both able to click and type. Wordwall, Boom Learning, Khan Academy, IXL, a leveled-reader site — the student does the activity instead of watching you click. Koala Free ships a limited cobrowser (session-length capped); Koala Pro removes the cap. The cobrowser is region-aware, with separate routing for mainland China so students there aren't fighting the Great Firewall inside a Western tool.
  • A 3D Playground for younger students. A shared 3D world where each student has a customisable avatar. Used as a brain break, a themed lesson surface, or the reason a seven-year-old wants to come back next week. A browser video call gives a kid nothing to be in; the Playground gives them a place.
  • Worldwide invoicing built in. Parents pay in their local currency, including via WeChat Pay in mainland China. There's a 4.5% Koala fee on Free-tier invoicing that drops to 3.5% on Pro and 0% on Platinum. No separate Stripe reconciliation.
  • Integrated scheduling on Pro. A teacher-and-parent scheduling portal where you set weekly availability once and parents book their own slots via a link. No Calendly bolt-on. Platinum adds a Scheduling Plus layer with 30/45/60-minute class lengths, booking-policy controls, and recurring classes — the "book all four Wednesdays for the month at once" flow a persistent room URL and a shared email chain can't hold.
  • Lesson recording on Pro and Platinum. Koala Pro records the lesson locally to your own machine (the same shape Whereby offers); Koala Platinum adds cloud recordings that save inside the classroom, per-lesson, so a family whose kid missed a session can catch up without derailing next week.
  • 24/7 live support on Pro with a real person. When something breaks mid-lesson, there's a human to reach rather than a help-centre article.

Koala Free is a genuine free tier (up to 4 students per session, worldwide invoicing, limited cobrowser, up to 3 activities), not a trial that expires — and it doesn't cap the lesson length the way Whereby Free's 30 minutes does — so you can run a real trial lesson end-to-end with a real student, on the device they actually use, and decide from there. Koala Pro is $25.99/month billed monthly or $21.99/month billed annually; Koala Platinum, which adds cloud recording and richer scheduling, is $49.99/month billed monthly or $39.99/month billed annually. That is more than Whereby Pro's $10.99 per host per month, and the honest comparison is that you're paying for a different thing: a tool built for teaching, not a friendly meeting tool with teaching bolted on.

Honest limits worth naming so you can weigh them against the fit: iPad works but is rougher than desktop; mainland-China connectivity is served by our Hong Kong proxy but is a moving target; the whiteboard's math tools ship in Pro (the symbol palette's operations, comparisons, and fraction slash) and Platinum (the powers, the advanced symbols, and the drag-and-drop fraction bars) but stop short of a full graphing or equation editor, so heavy STEM tutors should test the workflow on a real lesson first; and the Playground is actively developed with requested features (group-select of Playground objects) still on the roadmap. Roughly 81% of the tutors on our 2026 product/market fit survey said they'd be very disappointed if they could no longer use Koala Go — the "very disappointed" threshold conventionally taken to indicate strong product/market fit is 40%, so that number is well past the bar. That 81% figure is the same one we publish on the main landing page.

Keep Whereby for what it's good at

Nothing above is an argument to close your Whereby account. It is a genuinely good meeting tool, and for adult 1-on-1 talking lessons, therapy sessions, coaching calls, first-lesson stopgaps, and reliable-fallback duty, it earns its keep. Where it doesn't stretch is being your primary tutoring surface for young learners, for subjects the student needs to act on, or for a practice growing past the size where you can hold every booking in your head. Use it where it fits; use something built for teaching where it doesn't. Two tools, one for meetings and one for teaching, is not more complicated than one wrong tool held together with five bolt-ons — and past a certain practice size, it is materially simpler.

Bottom line

Whereby is one of the friendlier meeting tools around and a fine choice for one-on-one adult and teenage lessons that are mostly talking, for a first-lesson stopgap, and for reliable-fallback duty. For anyone teaching young learners, teaching subjects the student needs to act on, growing past a hand-held book of students, or serving families where a full stack of bolt-ons has stopped paying its own rent, the honest answer is that Whereby is where you take the meeting — not where the lesson itself should live. If you'd like our read on whether Koala Go fits your specific practice — subject, age range, region, current stack — write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with a sentence about the kind of tutoring you do. We're a small team and we read everything.

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